The architecture of living in the cracks

While houses in the ‘burbs just keep getting bigger, there’s an opposite movement afoot in urban areas, where there’s a new breed of architect looking to take advantage of every inch of valuable city real estate.

Global roof window manufacturer FAKRO teamed up with the magazine A10 new European architecture to put on a contest with the goal of redefining the loft space.

The winner was Live between Buildings by Ole Robin Storjohann andMateusz Mastalski:

Their various prototype proposals have nearly no ground footprint, being instead suspended in part or entirely between existing structures. In testing the idea, they took actual buildings and voids, abstracted and simplified their forms, all to show how such interventions would work in major cities from New York and London to Amsterdam and Tokyo.

Here are a few whimsical modular designs from the team that take advantage of every inch.